On Information Anxiety
Information Overload
Fear of Surveillance, Control and Exclusion
Growing Commercialisation of the Internet
On Moods
On the Moods of Information Society

References

On
Information Anxiety

We live in an
information society. To be well informed means, if we trust our
everyday
experience, anxiety reduction. But today we are paradoxically
plagued with information anxiety. According to Richard
Wurman
information anxiety has (at least) two sources, the first one concerns
our
relation to information, the second one our relation to each other. He
writes:

“Information
anxiety is produced by the ever-widening gap between what we understand
and
what we think we should understand. Information anxiety is the black
hole
between data and knowledge. It happens when information doesn’t tell us
what we
want to know.” (Wurman 2001: 14).

Following
this
logic, the more the information the greater the hermeneutic challenge
of making
sense and, consequently, of anxiety reduction. As John Seely Brown und
Paul
Duguid rightly state

:

“For it is not
shared stories or shared information so much as shared interpretation
that
binds people together. […] To collaborate around shared information you
first
have to develop a shared framework for interpretation. “Each of us
thinks his
own thoughts,” the philosopher Stephen Toulmin argues. “Our concepts we
share.”” (Brown/Duguid 2000: 107)

Information
technology and
information
hermeneutics
are two
sides of the same coin. But as far as no human society can survive
without
information it can also be said that every human society is an
information
society. This historical perspective of former information societies
has, as
Michael Hobart and Zachary Schiffman state, a liberating effect. They
write:

“The
fundamental
fact of information’s historicity liberates us from the conceit that
ours is
the information age […] It allows us to stand outside our contemporary
information idiom, to see where it comes from, what it does, and how it
shapes
our thought.”(Hobart/Schiffman 1998)

Our present
economy,
policy, scientific research, technological innovation, and, last but
not least,
our everyday life are largely dependent on digital
information. In this sense we can state that information anxiety and
its
counterpart, information trust, are the basic moods of today’s
digitally
networked information society.

Information
Overload

The Internet
is,
following Wurman, the “black hole” between data and knowledge. It does
not tell
us what we want to know. What we want to know depends on our situation,
i.e.,
on our existential conditions, on our history and commitments, on our
beliefs
and desires. What we want to know is partly explicit but it remains
implicit on
a great extent. It emerges in the moment in which we become aware of
the
relevance of the gap between “what we understand” und “what we think we
should
understand.” This awareness arises, for instance, when our critical
spirit does
not trust the present knowledge as a secure basis for the future. In
our
digital-based economy this attitude is being reflected globally and 24
hours a day in our finance markets, being constantly driven between
the moods
of trust and anxiety. Any kind of foreknowledge rests on assumptions
that
cannot be completely made explicit because this would imply an absolute
knowledge that is unattainable for a finite being. There is no complete
information for a human knower.

This trivial
but
basic assumption has been forgotten or was just ignored by some of our
modern economic
theories as they invented the homo
oeconomicus rationalis. But, hélas!,
there is no possibility for us to fill the gap between information and
knowledge and, consequently, between trust and anxiety. There is no
mood-free rational
economy. Even more, moods are not the opposite to rationality but
rationality
itself is already in a mood of a knower who trusts (or not) sense data
and
his/her (imperfect) predicting capacity. According to David Hume: “Our
actions
have a constant union with our motives, tempers, and circumstances.”
(Hume
1962: 272).

Herbert
Simon coined the
concept of “bounded rationality,”
following
the hints by Friedrich von Hayek in his 1945 paper “The Use of
Knowledge in Society,”
making plausible that it is the “pragmatic mechanism” with no promises
of
optimization, and not the “ideal market mechanism”, that fits the real
world (Simon
1982: 41-43). Uncertainty and expectations are the basic moods of the
pragmatic
market mechanism. According to Simon, we should remain sceptical
assuming that
people form their expectations about the future rationally and that
firms and
investors can thus predict the future of their business based on the
permanent
prevalence of such an assumption as in the case of Adam Smith’s
“invisible
hand” and Hegel’s “List der Vernunft”.

Richard
Wurman
mentions another source of information anxiety that concerns our
relation to
each other in a network society:

“Our relationship
to information isn’t the only source of information anxiety. We are
also made
anxious by the fact that other people often control our access to
information.
We are dependent on those who design information, on the news editors
and
producers who decide what news we will receive, and by decision-makers
in the
public and private sector who can restrict the flow of information. We
are also
made anxious by other people’s expectations of what we should know, be
they
company, presidents, or even parents.” (Wurman 2001: 14

)

Fear
of Surveillance, Control and Exclusion

While the
first source
of information anxiety has to do with information overload, the second
one is
related to the fear of surveillance, control, and exclusion. While
creating a
global medium like the Internet we are confronted with exclusion or
what we use
to call the digital divide. Since
11 September 2001, but also since 11 March 2004 (when terrorist bombers
struck Madrid), we are facing the
reality of
a web of trust becoming a web of
surveillance. After the shock of March 11, Spanish voters send each
other text messages. Within a few hours several thousand of them met
apparently spontaneously
in order
to protest against the official information policy. This makes clear
the kind
of synergy made possible by the mobile web, while at the same time the
collective fear of, say, viruses attacks, privacy infringements, theft
and
pornography, make the idea of a net of
control not only plausible but even desirable, at least from the
viewpoint
of some governments and pressure groups as stated by Lawrence Lessig
(1999) and
newly also by liberal philosopher Richard Rorty (2004).

Net control
is
becoming
a legitimate part of the "war against terrorism". But this "war" is an
asymmetric war and cannot be won with a top-down strategy based on the
mood of
anxiety.
This is exactly what terrorists want. The "war against terrorism"
becomes, according
to Rorty, a greater threat to Western democracies than terrorism
itself. The
alternative seems to be between slavery within a “goodwill despotism”
(Rorty op.cit.)
and liberty under the threat of terrorism. In today’s information
society the
price of trust is liberty and the price of liberty is anxiety. Tertium non datur.

Thomas
L.
Friedman, the New York Times
columnist, reports of a wood-paneled room in Bangalore
where the Indian software giant Infosys
can hold
a simultaneous global teleconference with its U.S.
innovators. Mr. Nilekani,
CEO of Infosys explains:

“We can have our
whole global supply chain on the screen at the same time.”

The
journalist comments:

“Who
else has
such a global supply chain today? Of course: Al Qaeda. Indeed, these
are the
two basic responses to globalization: Infosys and Al Qaeda.” (Friedman
2004)

Growing
Commercialisation of the Internet

Close
to this
anxiety in face of a net of control and/or of terrorism is the anxiety
related
to the growing commercialisation of the Internet. It leads to what John
Walker
calls “the digital imprimatur.” (Walker 2003). This means no more and
no less
than the end of the Internet as we know it today when Big Brother and
big media
put “the Internet genie back in the bottle” through Trusted Computing,
Digital
Rights Management, and the Secure Internet on the basis of
"micropayment" and "document certificates." This is, from a historical
perspective, a
victory of
the hierarchic 20th century mass media. It is devoted to
guaranteeing trust through control by equating freedom with anxiety on
the
basis of digital Leviathans. The principles stated and the actions
started by
the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) as well as by
several civil
society initiatives in favour of freedom of communication (Internet
Commons
Congress 2004) are at the opposite of this vision.

On
Moods

Anxiety
is a
mood. According to
ordinary understanding
moods happen
inside our minds. In his famous dictionary of the English language
Samuel
Johnson defines anxiety as:

“The
quality or
state of being anxious; uneasiness or trouble of mind about some
uncertain
event; solicitude, concern.” (OED 1989)

Compare
these definitions
with Friedman’s description of the intersection between Al Qaeda and
information technology in Madrid
on 11 March 2004:

“Ever
once in a
while the technology and terrorist supply chains intersect – like last
week.
Reuters quoted a Spanish official saying after the Madrid train bombings: “The hardest
thing
[for the rescue workers] was hearing mobile phones ringing in the
pockets of the
bodies. They couldn’t get that our of their heads.” (Friedman op.cit.)

If
we use the
word anxiety for describing the mood of the Spanish officials in face
of the
unbelievable terrorist threat, we would prima
facie agree with the conception of moods as something happening
within
their heads. But it is also evident that this interpretation of moods
is one-sided since what is going on in the heads of the rescue workers
cannot
be dissociated from the whole situation in which they are embedded. In
other
words, we can speak of a terrible situation as a mood concerning
only the
heads of the rescue workers but, in fact, it concerns the whole
situation
within
a train station, a city, a country and even the whole European
continent.
Moods are then related not just to private feelings but they pervade
the
situation in which subjects are inserted. Our states-of-mind cannot be
dissociated from their circumstances.

This
view is also
the one developed by Martin Heidegger’s phenomenological approach
(Heidegger
1976: 134). According to Heidegger, moods are not primarily private
feelings
but they disclose a public experience, i.e. they concern the way(s) we
are in
a given situation with others in a common world. Being originally
social our
feelings do not separate us from each other but even in the case in
which we
speak of mood as a subjective state, this belongs already to the
situation in
which I am embedded implicitly or explicitly together with others. In
his
commentary on Heidegger’s Being and
Time Hubert Dreyfus writes:

“For
example,
when one is afraid, one does not merely feel
fearful, nor is fear merely the movement
of cringing; fear is cringing in an appropriate context.” (Dreyfus
1991: 172)

The
psychologist,
Eugene Gendlin remarks that Heidegger’s conception of mood is more
“interactional” than “intrapsychic” (Gendlin 1978). In his
article on
Heidegger’s concept of
“Befindlichkeit” he writes:

“'Sich
befinden'
(finding oneself) thus has three allusions: The reflexivity of finding
oneself;
feeling; and being situated. All three are caught in the ordinary
phrase, “How
are you?” That refers to how you feel but also to how things are going
for you
and what sort of situation you find yourself in. To answer the question
you
must find yourself, find how you already are. And when you do, you find
yourself amidst the circumstances of your living."

Gendlin
underlines another important difference of the Heideggerian conception
of mood
with regard to the traditional subjectivist view, namely the relation
of mood
and understanding, or, more precisely, the conception of mood as a
specific way
of understanding. Moods are not just affections colouring a situation,
but are an active although mostly implicit way
of understanding a situation independently of what we actually say or
not with
explicit words. There is then, according to Heidegger, a difference as
well as
an intimate relation between mood, understanding and speech as the
three basic
parameters of human existence.

In
"Being and
Time", Heidegger gives a famous analysis of two moods, namely fear
(“Furcht”)
and anxiety (“Angst”),
borrowing basic insights from Kierkegaard’s Concept of
Anxiety. The key difference between these moods is that while
fear
is a
mood in which one is afraid about something fearsome, anxiety, in
contrast, faces us
with our
being-in-the-world itself in such a way that no intra-worldly entity is
at its
origin. But we are confronted with the very fact of the being there,
with our
existence in the world, and of the being of the world itself, without
the
possibility of giving an intrinsic reason for them. Dreyfus remarks:

“In
anxiety
Dasein discovers that it has no meaning or content of its own; nothing
individualizes it but its empty thrownness.” (Dreyfus 1991: 180)

Such
an
experience is not necessarily accompanied by sweating and crying, but
it is
rather more near to what we could call today a "cool"
experience of the gratuity of existence. Ludwig Wittgenstein
describes such a “key experience” (“mein
Erlebnis par excellence”) in
his "Lecture on Ethics" with the following words:

“This
experience,
in case I have it, can be described most properly, I believe, with the
words I am amazed about the existence of the world.
Then I tend to use formulations like these ones: 'How strange that
something
exists at all' or 'How strange that the world exists'" (Wittgenstein
1989: 14, my translation)

But
according to
Wittgenstein we have really no appropriate expression for this
experience –
other than the existence of language itself. On 30 December 1929
Wittgenstein
remarked:

“I
can imagine
what Heidegger means with being and anxiety. Human beings have the
tendency to
run against the boundaries of language. Think for instance about the
astonishment that something at all exists. […] Ethics
is this run against the boundaries of language.”
(Wittgenstein 1984: 68, my translation)

On
the Moods of Information Society

How
are we doing
in today’s information society? What is our mood? In view of the
difference
between fear and anxiety we can answer that within the situation of
being-in-the-network we are in the mood of fear and trust. We use the
Internet
in everyday life in such a way that not only the Gnostic perspective of
cyberspace as something separated from the real world – as promulgated,
for
instance, by John Perry Barlow (1996) – has become
outdated as
mobile and miniaturized computing – we could call this the Vodafone
effect – but is now everywhere embedded in our everyday
material life. Just the opposite of cyberspace mythology happened. This
creates
indeed a mood of (implicit) trust. But at the same time it gives rise
to new
types of fear as the pervasive connection of all things can also lead
to
disastrous outcomes.

And
what about anxiety? It
seems as if the
network
does
create a kind of digital veil that conceals the type of experience
addressed by
Wittgenstein and Heidegger with the concept of anxiety. The network is
more of
the kind of instrumental grid called by later Heidegger “Gestell”
(literally "enframing") i.e. of a collection of all kinds of
positioning
(“stellen”) or manipulation
of things. We could use this term with regard to information society by
calling
information Gestell all forms
of
language production and manipulation (Capurro 2000).

But
is today’s
experience of, say, ubiquitous computing, multifunctional cellular
phones, and
permanent online accessibility, really at the opposite of the kind of
affective
understanding arising from our confrontation with the abyss of human
existence
as manifest in the mood of anxiety? Does the information Gestell
create a kind of super human subject with all kinds of
enhanced capabilities, as described for instance by MIT designer
William J.
Mitchell in his book "ME++" (Mitchell 2003)? David Hume
writes:

“When
I turn my
reflection on myself, I never can
perceive this self without some or
more perceptions; nor can I ever perceive anything but the perceptions.
It is
the composition of these, therefore, which forms the self.” (Hume 1962:
283)

In
today’s
information society we form ourselves and our selves through digitally
mediated
perceptions of all kinds. Interconnectivity does not mean the death of
the
modern subject as proclaimed by some popular postmodernists but its
transformation into a “nodular subject” (Mitchell) which means,
paradoxically,
a weakening of its manipulating ambitions. The power of networks does
not lead
necessarily to slavery and oppression but also to reciprocity and
mutual
obligation. Globalisation gives rise to the question of what does
locally matter. Cyberspace vanishes into the diversity of complex
real/virtual space-time connections of all kinds which are not any more
separable form everyday life and its materiality. The boundaries of
language against
which we
are driven appear now as the boundaries of digital networks which not
only
pervade but accelerate all relationships between humans as well as
between all
kinds of natural phenomena and artificial things. But, indeed, the
subject of
the digital network is at the same time its creator and its object.

From
a more radical
perspective, if we follow the tendency not
only
to
drive against the boundaries of language but also against the
boundaries of the
digital, we may be able to experience life in a networked world in a
mood of
anxiety. And we might then make a trivial statement like: "I am amazed
about the
existence of a digital networked world" switching for a while from
fear, as the everyday mood of information society, into anxiety and
calmness,
giving ourselves an opportunity to perceive what Buddhists call
"nothingness".